I had a bash script which had been working, via Connect (screen sharing mode) for months, troublefree.
Suddenly it starts failing today, with:
Failed to execute child process "xterm"
The only thing I did yesterday was a full (fool) package update.....

Any known fixes or suggestions?

Thanks in advance.


RPi model 5, version (8 Mb)
Bookworm (64)

pibrator wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 11, 2025 10:13 pm

Suddenly it starts failing

The error message does not come from your script, or from bash, or from Connect. It would have been useful to mention that you were trying to launch the script using the GUI file manager, pcmanfm, because that is the "it" that (I think) is failing.

If you go to Edit→Preferences→Advanced in the file manager, the "Terminal emulator" setting should normally say "x-terminal-emulator %s". Has yours changed to "xterm" somehow?

pibrator wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 11, 2025 10:13 pm

Any known fixes or suggestions?

Not unless you can tell us why it "Failed to execute child process "xterm"'

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Thanks to all who responded.
I suspect Jojopi is on the track of something -

When I go to "preferences -- advanced", the values of both "terminal emulator" and "format command " are blank.......

When I put in the value suggested by Jojopi, the same thing happened.

Any more clues (please be explicit in any responses - I'm worse than useless)

Cheers

If I make my setting blank, I get the same error about "xterm". If I set it to nonsense, I get an error about "nonsense" instead. When I change it back to "x-terminal-emulator %s" (without the quotes), execute in terminal works again.

Do you have a file ~/.config/libfm/libfm.conf, and does the terminal= setting appear there in the [config] section?

Did you run out of disk space at any point? I am trying to think of a reason that your setting might have been lost.

(It is normal for the format command setting to be blank.)

It happened to me after I ran out of disk space (as I remembered later). Scripts run from the main menu gave the same error. AlI I had to do was follow the advice (maybe from the same people) to repopulate that field with x-terminal-emulator %s

It may have been necessary to get pcmanfm to re-read its preferences by logging off and on, or maybe killing it and restarting it.

I also had and educational experience following the chain of symlinks that x-terminal-emulator is part of.

Jojopi:
Re: "do you have a file ~/.config etc" - yes and the terminal line in the config section seems fine....

Jojopi and PDM1950:
Disk space: I am not aware of that happening.

Re-populating field:
I will give it a go tomorrow, and post progress here.

Cheers

I wasted a lot of time by installing the 'missing' xterm and discovering it was a different terminal emulator altogether. There is a symlink xterm that points (eventually) to the same place as x-terminal-emulator . My hunch - which didn't follow up - is the pcfmafm was defaulting to xterm but not then encountering that symlink in the path.

I initially didn't remember that I had filled the disk the day before (by accidentally dropping a huge file onto an application that tried to do some thing with it) because I backed out of the mistake and didn't need to reboot.